In Dreams Begin... What?

Since this is, among other things, a What If? kind of blog - here's one:
I woke in the small hours from a tortuous dream in which I was apparently attempting to make my way across Holland by train, impeded at every turn by endlessly ramifying, fantastically detailed Kafkaesque complications (in dreams I can't so much as cross a road, let alone Holland, without stuff like this happening). As I awoke I was filling in some kind of fiendishly elaborate form, in a script I didn't recognise... My first thoughts were along the lines of Duh, where did all that come from? (I haven't the faintest idea). And then I thought, What would life feel like if we didn't dream? I think it would hugely affect our sense of ourselves, of what our selves are, and would make life flatter, more prosaically causative, diminished by what amounts to a dimension, and a most mysterious one at that...
Any thoughts? What would it be like if we just went to sleep, woke up and that was that? (We'd probably be less tired - I would anyway).

Mugabe Survives End of Universe

These are momentous times. Naomi Campbell has been handcuffed on a plane. I note that she chose to wear a baseball cap to conceal her features from the snappers. This is the preferred style of celebrity arrestees as it does not fully conceal and gives the paps just enough to leave them begging for more. Ordinary types tend to favour a blanket or coat. Meanwhile, Blair has decided to do God in the midst of his post-prime ministerial idyll. God is said to be flattered and delighted. And, finally, if you think the Large Hadron Collider will destroy the world if not the universe, then you are, apparently, a moron. So that's it then, we've got less than a year left. Morons, 'brights', supermodels and ex-prime ministers will be consumed by the soft whoosh of a phase transition in the cosmic background energy or vacuum metastability disaster. A kinder, gentler cosmos will replace the one we know and feel distinctly ambivalent about. Zimbabwe, however, will remain much the same.

An Indignity in Holland Park

Walking in Holland Park just now, minding my own business and enjoying the cherry blossom, my reverie was rudely shattered by a passing bird which - sorry, there's no other way of putting it - beshat my head from a considerable height. A far as I can recall, this has only once happened to me before - in Dieppe, when an aggrieved mouette struck a blow against perfidious Albion by similarly anointing my head. What manner of bird the culprit was this time I didn't see - perhaps it was a cormorant bent on revenge. This is war.

A New Baggott?

I might have been dreaming, or lapsed into some kind of TV-induced state of altered consciousness, but I'm pretty sure that last night I saw an Olay Regenerist commercial which appeared to be new and did not feature Nadine Baggott. This woman had a similarly immobile face, unmarked by any evidence of cognition, emotion or other human life-related activity, but definitely had dark hair and, I'm pretty sure, a name that was not Nadine Baggott. The ad itself was, of course, every bit as nauseating as the original. It spoke of a 'new pack', which might have justified a change of Baggott - but as I say, I might have been dreaming. I'm also pretty sure I saw an ad in which a man fed cat food - Whiskas, I believe - to a cat. This has never happened before in adland, where they work on the commonsense assumption that any man keeping a cat as a pet is by definition gay. This ad, though, had not the slightest hint of pink appeal. Truly we live in strange times - but I'd be relieved to have confirmation that, Regenerist-wise, I was not dreaming...

A Serious and Practical Suggestion from Nige?

So - the eagerly awaited (not) new coin designs are unveiled. They have the predictable air of a 1st-year art school design project, but perfectly express the fragmentation of the United Kingdom under the Labour regimen. I doubt this was intended. But I was going to post about coins anyway, to point out that, here in Britain, there are just too many of the blasted things - 27 billion in circulation, apparently, which is more than 500 per man, woman and child. Why do we not hit paper money till £5 is changing hands - in practice £10, as fivers are in notoriously short supply. There can't be another currency in the world so coin-dominated. The result is bulging trouser pockets for the gentlemen, bursting purses for the ladies, and nuisance all round. Personally I tend to count out the exact money when I can, in the continental fashion, but even I end up staggering under the weight of loose coinage. Happily I am ofen passing through London railway termini, and there, on many retail counters, there are collecting boxes for a charity called Railway Children (a proper charity, it seems, not supporting the obese children of overpaid RMT members). I regularly and gratefully unload my pockets of loose copper and small silver into these boxes. But the problem is universal - so, for once, I have a serious and practical suggestion: why doesn't another charity, or consortium of charities, place collecting boxes on every retail counter in the land? A grateful nation would unburden itself of coinage and the charities would be raking it in.

The End of the World Is Nigh, But...

You have to laugh, don't you? Wasn't this good enough for them - their world ending a little earlier and without the hail of brimstone?

Short Books

Yesterday the subject of Edward Burne-Jones came up - this was in that strange world beyond the blogosphere where people talk etc - and I recommended to a friend the book Visionary And Dreamer by Lord David Cecil. For those who don't know it, this is a pair of elegant, discerning biographical essays which compare and contrast Burne-Jones (dreamer) and Samuel Palmer (visionary). It makes its point and tells ou all you need to know within the compass of one pleasingly silm volume. He performs a similar trick (though not comparing and contrasting) with Dorothy Osborne and Thomas Gray in Two Quiet Lives. This is a model of biography that seems now to belong to the past, as biographers - too many of whom are academics (as was Cecil, of course, though in a sense unknown to modern Academe) - revert to the Victorian shove-it-all-in model, resulting in huge, often all but unreadable, tomes which might give you all the facts, but precious little insight. Cecil's selective and sympathetic biography of Max Beerbohm is a vastly more rewarding read, and tells you much more about the man, than more ambitious modern efforts, e.g. N. John Hall's compendious Max Beerbohm: A Kind of Life.
Why are books so big these days? It's not just biographies (I'm currently reading one of Captain B's fat histories, a daunting prospect even in paperback (perfect bound of course, so the spine snaps at the points where the plates and bunched) - excellent book though, needless to say). Most contemporary novels too could be cut by a third and more with no loss. Hearing some of these read on Radio 4, they often still seem overlong - and they've already been cut by 80 percent. This literary gigantism seems quite counterintuitive - if these books are actually intended to be read (and in some cases I have my doubts). Who, beyond the small world of dedicated readers, has the time for these baggy monsters? Isn't modern life notoriously fast and full of distractions (e.g. the blogosphere)? We want short books - well I do - and make them small too. With a necessarily long book, why not publish in two volumes? As Cecil did with his best known work, his great biography of Lord Melbourne...

The Blogger Humbled

The thing about blogging, since we are on the subject, is that it's humbling. In the decades in which I was a journalist without a blog, I, like most hacks, idly regarded readers as an occasional inconvenience. Responses to the snail mails were hurriedly sent, a chore and no more. (Once I realised I had sent the same reply to the same reader at least seven times. He kept writing and I kept responding - 'Thank you for your fascinating letter..' - without ever noticing that he was not many men but one.) The blog changed all that. The comments on this blog are, on average, better written, funnier and often better informed than anything in any newspaper or magazine. And, perhaps because the commenters are a  self-selected bunch, they also seem to know me better than I thought I could be known by mere readers - Elberry, in particular, seems to have an access all areas pass to my psyche. This is, as I say, humbling because it gives me repeated Gray's Elegy moments - 'Full many a flower is born to blush unseen' - and it draws my attention to the perhaps obvious truth that the best people are not necessarily those granted access to the luxuries of public expression and status. In part, these thoughts are inspired by the reactions to my post of yesterday, but also I was struck by 'Richard Madeley's' post about his friend whose novel is not now being published. People burn to write and, in the case of Richard's friend, they believe that making people smile is 'a moral way of living'. They are right to burn and right to believe. The gifted people who use this blog to show what Auden called an 'affirming flame' are the reason I continue and why Nige has joined me with such brilliance and enthusiasm. Okay, that's done, back to cheap laughs and futile metaphysical head clutching.

Blog in Boring Crisis

My wife emails me - she is six feet away, but doors can be such a nuisance - to tell me my blog is getting boring. I am at a loss. Is it possible to burn blogs as overwrought poets and novelists used to burn manuscripts? I must look into this.

April Fools: A Roundup

April Fools' Day and there's some pretty obvious spoof news items out there. The Guardian, for example, tries to persuade us there has been an inquest into the death of Princess Diana inspired by allegations that she was killed by MI6 and - get this - the Duke of Edinburgh. The Telegraph nudges us in the ribs with some ludicrous tale about thousands of lost bags and cancelled flights at the new Heathrow Terminal 5. In The Sun we are told the Italian police want to protect Manchester United fans. Yeah, right. The Mail pretends that Harriet Harman was so stupid that she wore a stab-proof vest while walking round her own constituency. The Times seriously expects us to believe that Tibetans welcomed the Olympic flame. The Daily Star kids us with the news that Velvet Revolver will NOT be suporting Led Zep on their world tour. The FT has some preposterous yarn about UBS losing even more money. I have to say these are all pretty feeble. None of them fooled me for a moment and none are actually funny - except Harman's stab vest. Must try harder next year, guys, and now back to reality...